Ancient Fire

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 2 OCT 2000

Williams makes his publishing debut with this inventively twisted time travel tale, the first in the Danger Boy series. In 2019, 12-year-old Eli begins his narrative just after his move to Sonoma, Calif., with his father from their hometown of Princeton, N.J., where his father, Sandusky, experimented with "spacetime spheres." There he successfully changed the electrical charges of particles so that he could accelerate them through space and move them backward through the air and through time. After Eli's mother disappeared in an explosion while working on a related experiment, Sandusky abandoned his project, took Eli and headed west. Yet his villainous boss tracks him down at his new residence and insists that he carry on his work with Eli as the subject of his experiments. "I was going to be twirled around in time and history, like a smoothie in a great big cosmic blender," notes the boy. Eli's first-person narrative alternates with those of two other youngsters he meets in his time travels: Clyne, a good-natured dinosaur from another planet who gathers information for a school assignment, and Thea, last librarian in Alexandria, the ancient Egyptian city, accused of being a witch. Williams introduces some provocative ideas about relativity within the context of these distinct and credible characters' narratives. He smoothly conveys the novel's rather complex goings-on, which involve some intriguing machinations about altering the course of history. Kids curious about what lies beyond the Fifth Dimension ("the passageway that connects different universes and different times to each other") will find this a rewarding excursion. Ages 9-12.